Chasing The General
Tuesday, October 13, 2009I've chased my share of ghosts in my life as a writer. A serial killer. A corrupt and powerful judge. The innocent victims of addiction. The last ghosts I caught. The killer got away.
For a good long while there, I thought the General might too.
The General was a high-ranking Nazi in Italy in the last two years of World War II. I first heard tell of him at a dinner party in Montana where I live. The General, it turned out, had played a powerful part in the extraordinary life of an Italian boy becoming a young man.
His name is Pino Lella. For fifty years Pino had kept the story of his life in the last two years of the war secret. But then he told some of it to an entrepreneur and social activist named Robert Dehlendorf, who told it to a guy named Larry Minkoff, who in turn, at that dinner party, told fragments of the story to me.
But those fragments were enough for me to know that if they were true, they might form the spine of what could be the last great untold story of World War II. Three months later, I landed in Milan. Pino met me, 80, tall, brawny and utterly charming and welcoming. He spent thirty years teaching skiing in the U.S. and speaks beautiful English, and had the energy of a man half his age.
Over the next two weeks Pino and I crisscrossed northern Italy, visiting the scenes of his remarkable coming of age tale of courage, of selflessness, of romance, of grief, of heartbreak, and mysteries that haunt him to this day.
Chief among these mysteries was the identity of the General. Pino did not and does not speak German. He communicated with the General in French. He claimed the man was the commander of the Organization Todt, the armaments and construction arm of the Nazi war machine.
He said he believed the General's name was "Kaufmann" or "Hoffman."
For the next three years after my visit to Italy, I worked to corroborate other aspects of Pino's amazing story, an epic tale that leaps from the fashion salons of Milan to a Catholic boy's school high in the Alps that served as a last way station for Jews wanting to escape the Nazis by climbing over the mountains into Switzerland in the winter of 1943-44. The boys were the guides. Pino was the original guide, responsible for saving dozens of refugees, Jewish and political.
That enough would have been a fascinating book.
But in April 1944, on the verge of being drafted, Pino was forced by his father and uncle to join the Organization Todt as a way of avoiding combat. Through serendipitous events, he became the driver for the General, and so became a spy inside the German High command in Italy, feeding his information through clandestine shortwave radios to the Allies listening in Switzerland.
Along the way, Pino met and fell into a tragic love affair with the maid who worked for the General's mistress, and became caught up in events that led to the surrender of the Germans in Italy in May, 1945.
Those events culminated with Pino being asked by an U.S. Army Major to conduct one last escape from Italy, a suicide mission that seemed designed to save and protect certain high-ranking Nazi officers at the very end of the war.
It took me three years of research to find evidence to corroborate most of the story. Indeed, I had virtually all of it except the identity of the General and the reasons behind the escape mission at the war's end. I consulted historians. I went to the National Archives of the United States and read every piece of paper I could find about the Organization Todt, and about the Italian resistance and the short-wave radios they used to contact the Allies.
But nowhere did I find mention of a General named Kaufmann or Hoffmann in the Organization Todt in Italy. I got to the point where I thought I was chasing a ghost that I might never see clearly.
Finally, last month, I went to Germany and spent eight days in the Bundesarchves in Berlin and the military archives in Freiburg. I discovered more and more mysteries, including documents that detailed a mass burning of top secret Organization Todt files in Milan in the last two weeks of the war.
Again, nowhere in those files did we find the General, or even someone remotely like him. The night before my last day of research, I was feeling glum. The translator I'd hired to help me was feeling glum. The General was a ghost, perhaps lost to history.
But then, around three in the morning, it hit me. Maybe the General did not work for the Organization Todt. Maybe he ran the Nazi agency that ran the Organization Todt.
Following this line of reasoning, we found the General around eleven that morning. We also found documents that hugely supported Pino's description of the General and the events in which he was involved in the last year of the war. We also discovered why Pino thought his name was Kaufmann or Hoffman, though it was not. I got a picture of him and sent it to Pino. Over the weekend he confirmed that this was the General he drove for and helped escape.
Sorry to be grinning, but I just caught a ghost!
posted by Mark Sullivan at
3:06 PM
